How Do You Like Your Crime Thrillers? Rare and Oozing With Love: Romanticism in Michael Mann's Manhunter

Let us talk of Michael Mann films in colours: If Heat (1995) is a bluey grey, all guns ties and smart jackets, and Collateral (2004) is the slick silvery grey of hitman Vincent's suit and hair cast against the yellow, smog-infused light of the Los Angeles night, then Manhunter (1986) is purple and green, deep black and bright azure, as if the psychology of the characters has been smeared across the screen. Pick the odd one out (it's Manhunter genius).  It's one of Mann's earlier endeavours and for me it's always stood somewhat apart from his other crime thrillers, nay, all crime thrillers.  Romance, the realm of bittersweet embraces and love that transcends time, rarely collides with hard-bitten cops and the methodology of twisted murderers, or at least not in this way; but Manhunter has it in spades.  Consider this scene: we see the reflection of a man's chest, beige skin tones intermingle with the night, his pensive expression suggesting his mind is elsewhere.  He is joined by his wife at the window:

Woman:  Remember the first time we met?

Man: Yeah

Woman: We were together in that room, even though I'd never seen you before we were sitting there speaking.  And something flickered across your face like a shadow and I said "What's that?"  Remember what you said?

The man pauses.

Man: I said "This is too good to relive."

Woman: Time is luck Will.  I know the value of every single day.

The dialogue is oblique, the words are pared down: 'in that room', the word 'speaking' instead of 'talking', as if a spell were being incanted into the air.  The recollection lacks context, it evokes a timeless intimacy between two characters, their voices spoken over a bed of swelling synthesizer which creates a dark churning melancholy.  Such a scene is far from typical for a grisly crime thriller.

Romance in it's broadest terms refers to a feeling of mystery and remoteness from everyday life, often associated with love.  In FBI criminal profiler Will Graham's (William Peterson) search for Francis 'The Tooth Fairy' Dollarhyde (Tom Noonan), a serial killer who bloodily murders families in their homes (it is a romantic film, honest), there oozes a thick, almost alien, ardour.  'Your primary sensory intake, that makes your dreams live, is seeing,' Graham says, and the entire film clutches this concept close to its heart.  Bedroom's bathed in blue light, expressionistic production design swathed in purple and green; the film's sumptuous visuals echo the heightened visual sensations that Dollarhyde's psychopathic urges feed off; this is no austere urban story.

The film is able to explicate those dramatic passions that are normally too cringe-worthy to watch in most movies; Manhunter's plot is cast in a visual and aural representation of it's sensory themes, the camera work and soundtrack achieve a sort of hyper-drama, a realisation of the character's motives in the very fabric of what we see and hear.  Graham, brilliantly downbeat in a sullen and disturbed performance by Peterson, voices thoughts aloud, directed at the killer: 'You took off your gloves and touched her didn't you?  Didn't you you son of a bitch!  But when your gloves were off, did you open their eyes?'  Having Graham speak out loud, angry and excited, is a method so outright, it almost catches the viewer off guard when first watching it, we're unsure how to take it: 'Is this crass?  Trite?  My gut tells me no...'  It works, because it is not exposition, it illustrates Graham's working method, as well as his mental state, in dynamic fashion.  Later Graham dreams of his wife, Molly, blonde hair and white beach clothes, as she walks down a pier towards him.  Framed close up, Graham looks lustfully at her from his yacht, high wailing synths soar on the soundtrack, the aural equivalent of the soft focus seagulls taking off into the blue sky behind him.  In many other films this would be an outrageously saccharine sequence, but here the shots take on a hallucinatory nature.

Brian Cox, who stars in the film as Hannibal Lektor, a psychopath that Graham nearly lost his mind apprehending, so deeply entrenched was he in Lektor's thought processess, mentions in the DVD extras that 'Lektor infects Will', Graham is a man unwell, talking to his reflection, speaking word to the killer (I'm gonna find you goddammit!'), hunting what is inside himself; Molly (Kim Griest) says 'Will, you're gonna make yourself sick.'  She's not wrong!  Throughout the film Will teeters on the edge, he steals furtive glances at photos of the murdered families during meetings, retraces the killers footsteps as if he is the killer.  He aludes to The Tooth Fairy as 'our boy', suggesting a certain empathy and fondness for this most brutal and deranged of murderers, and Graham's yearning for his wife chimes with the killer's own yearning for human and sexual contact.  This parity between hunter and hunted is wherein lies the danger zone.  The hounded look on Graham's face makes you wonder who is the hunter and who is the hunted?  Both cop and killer are looking for love and acceptance: Will needs his wife and child to keep him from the brink of the abyss, and the imposing and sepulchral Dollarhyde seems almost pacified when Reba (Joan Allen) sleeps with him, the interjection of a hopeful, adult relationship into his life calming his bloodthirsty needs.  The film beautifully draws these comparisons throughout: using the same POV shot for both characters when they climb the same set of stairs, Will recognizing how Dollarhyde can be caught when he realises they've both been watching the same home movies of the victims.


Because it was made in 1986 and uses some stylistic tropes of that era, I feel Manhunter has to fight against being dismissed as a corny movie, made harder by it's daring, romantic approach to it's subject.  Manhunter is not banal; just because it is a 1980's film does not mean it is automatically trite.  Yes Graham talks to himself, yes his wife declares in a particularly impassioned way: 'I'm here.  I'll be here whenever you come home.  Or I'll meet you, anywhere.  Anytime.  That's what I called to say', but these moments come off as dramatic and romantic rather than shallow or crass.  The use of an affirming, mesmerizing pop song (The Prime Movers 'Strong As I Am') as Dollarhyde rips up his vans dashboard in anguish, the purple light which bathes Reba and her male friend as he jealously observes them (purple seems to symbolise something to do with insanity in this film, as it also inexplicably rises out of Hannibal Lektor's sink) and the psycho-sexual extravagance of the scene where Dollarhyde takes Reba to the zoo to caress a huge, tranquilised tiger testify to this romance, something remote from everyday life.  As Reba's hand is guided up and down the beautiful, inert creature by it's keeper, Dollarhyde stands against the wall and slowly reclines his head, closes his eyes and opens his mouth, aroused by the sense of power he now attains.  The whole sequence resounds with an unfulfilled yearning, a romantic, erotic, visual feast.  I just haven't seen this in other crime thrillers.  To describe this film in single adjectives 'passionate' 'melancholy' and 'bewitching' will always precede 'tense' or 'thrilling'.


Although later Mann films such as Heat or Collateral set the bar for serious crime/cop thrillers in the 90's and 2000's, neither has the sumptuous intensity that drips from every frame of Manhunter; you feel subsumed in it as Will Graham stares at his reflection, calling out to the killer, as shards of purple and green fracture and illuminate each location, infusing everything with a strange, throbbing beauty.